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RejectReality
1 day ago
Straight Male
United States

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Quote by KimmiBeGood

Quote by deviantsusie
I don’t get that either but then my activity seems stuck unless a friend comments on another friends activity.

I posted a micro to check out the new editor. Sadly when I cut and pasted from google docs, every return in google docs became a double return so had to manually delete one between every paragraph. Just as well it was a micro 🙄

And I’m not having a go at any developers or mods in posting this, just feeding back that there is a glitch. I was using chrome on a laptop if that helps. 💋♥️

Same. If I delete a line between every paragraph after I copy/paste from Docs, then submit, the spacing adjusts upon submitting to where the spacing looks good in published version. I don't see the proper spacing until after the Submit though. But I think my latest stories look good.

While I haven't tried the new submission form, I had to do special preparations for mine due to spacing issues on the 1.0 submission form as well.

Try a find for: ^p^p and replace it with ^p

The original document will look like utter garbage as a wall of text. ( Keep a readable master copy ) but it came out right once pasted and submitted. May be worth a try if you have the extra lines between paragraphs.

Quote by WannabeWordsmith

Quote by RejectReality
It's about 70/30 queue/sail through for me.

I have an unfounded suspicion it might be to do with tidying up spaces at the end of the piece. Maybe on resub, if it trims the whitespace as a service (or something) that triggers the "eeek, the story body is different" and diverts it to the queue instead of passing straight through. But if your story has none at the end, it bypasses it.

A total guess so I might be way off.

Most of these have been through the re-sub process once before for the same reason when previous/next links were introduced under 1.0. If it was that, I think they would have already had anything trimmed the first go-around.

Quote by adele
As long as all you were doing was adding or correctiong the series information and not making any other changes, the stories went right through on Lush v1. I always added a note just in case, but the vast majority right through without moderator intervention. I hope that doesn't change.

It's about 70/30 queue/sail through for me. Seems to be no particular rhyme or reason why. Three chapters of a story will need approval, then the fourth goes through. First chapter requires approval, second goes through, final two require approval. Then a whole 4 part series will go through, and every part of a 10 chapter story will need approval.

That's the same experience I had under the old system as well, so the ease of use and instant re-sorting is still a huge + for me.

It's going to take forever to finish linking everything up though. I wait at least a couple of hours after one's been approved before trying again, and the next one usually goes in the queue as well. Every once in a while I might have a run of luck and change 2-3 without waiting, but it's rare. Last one was just approved 10 minutes ago, so maybe I'll drop another right before I go to bed.

Quote by LakeShoreLimited
Oh, I just saw the new series management page. It has a little icon next to the series name. Should it be the newest at the top or the oldest? I guess that is my call. Now, if they could only deal with that white space under the story problem.


First story in the series at the top, flowing to the final story at the bottom.  When you link up a new one, it will always move to the bottom.  You can then move it as necessary from series management to put it in the proper chronological place.  A nice improvement over what we had.

Now, if only someone could tell me why some existing stories/chapters go straight through without moderation, while others go into the queue, when I'm doing the exact same thing to all of them — adding the series designation, and nothing else.

As a matter of fact, I've actually edited the moderator section on a few of them that went through without moderation, while I didn't change that section ( it still had an old moderator note saying I'm linking them as chapters that serves the purpose ) on some, and those hit the queue.

Baffling.

Not that this is new.  It happened when I was linking chapters under the old system as well.

I'm trying to wait at least a few hours after one goes into the queue and the minor change gets approved.  I have to click the new ( author ) series button once I submit each change to see if it went through or got stuck in the queue, because there's no difference in the prompt.  Thankfully, there's a "in review" notation on those that hit the queue within the series management, so I don't have to dig back through my story list to check.

Someone said it works in Mozilla ( Firefox ) but I haven't tested it yet.  It's worth a go if that's not what you're already using, and if you're willing to go to the trouble of a second browser.  I already use three to keep my different pen names logged in elsewhere, so it's no biggie for me, assuming it does work.

Okay, I've got another one.  The series editing is wonderful.  It's also exactly the code that would allow us to order our story page as we wish, so the heavy lifting on that is already complete.  It's just a matter of implementing it.  Still need the ability to edit existing stories to make them a series, and a button on the story page similar to the "unpublished" button would be nice for quicker access to series editing, but what's there is easy to use and works like a charm.  My existing series are all back in the proper order in a scant couple of minutes.

ETA: Okay, figured out how to create new series.  Didn't realize you could just start typing.  Since adding a series is requiring moderator approval, I guess I'll have to go slow.  Don't want to overload the queue, and there's a lot to link up.

Okay, I've got one.


The full numerical breakdown of the bar graph is an improvement over the original, and I like it.

I will say that if pasting with formatting intact isn't an option, allowing us to use BBcode and have it interpreted into the correct HTML formatting for the final posting would also be acceptable.  I can at least prepare my documents in advance with find/replace to do that.  Doing it with the GUI is what I find too tedious and prone to omission.


Paste with formatting intact, detailed stats, popular lists by category, and the ability to quickly locate one of our own stories via search or removal of the pagination are the deal-breakers for me. The rest is irritating or sucking the joy out of the site for me, but those are what make the effort vs. reward calculation fail to balance.

Paste with formatting is #1 because I would be willing to add cross-venue work if I had that. The rest are discouraging me from writing the short Lush exclusives that don't perform particularly well anywhere else.  I simply don't see them reaching performance levels here that make it worth the effort as things are.


Quote by adele

I realize that it is probably an exercise in futility, but when we are told that very few complaints have been received (this despite the fact that the thread to report bugs was locked because there were too many complaints about missing features) and that some of the features won't be done because the developers say THEIR users didn't like them when they were polled or that 75% of THEIR users access the site on a phone, I just felt we needed to let them see in an open forum if they are right or wrong.

Quote by adele

  1.   Are you an author?

Yes

  2.   Do you primarily use the chat rooms, forums, neither or both.

Forums  

3.   What is the main device you access Lush with? phone/tablet, lappy or PC

PC

  4.   On a scale of 1 to 5 (5 being the happiest) how happy are you with the chatroom changes?

 Don't care.  Don't use. 

5.   On a scale of 1 to 5, how happy are you with the forum changes?

2  Jump to last post links are nice.  Separation between posts is terrible.  Signatures are bare bones. 

 6.   As an author, on a scale of 1 to 5, how happy are you with the story changes?

0 Don't like the new presentation of stories, especially those with top images.

  7.   On a scale of 1 to 5, how happy are you with the general overall design changes?

0 Author features barely exist, and what's there is buggy.

  8.   Which chatroom features do you miss the most? (ex. mention vs just selecting a name, whisper,  "landing" directly into a room, room size, etc)

Don't care.  Don't use.

  9.  Which forum features do you miss the most? (ex. new format, harder to post pics, forum signature, etc.)

Signatures.  Designing my story banners is one of the things that gives me joy.  Being able to use images from galleries other than the main one in the forum.  Being able to preview before submitting a post.

10.  As an author, which story features do you miss the most? (ex. detail vs rounding stats, ability to sort, tags at end of story instead of top, etc.)

Detailed stats.  Pasting with formatting intact.  Popular lists.  Read lists.  Landscape top images.  Sorting our story lists.  Being able to find anything in our story lists ( Need search if it's going to remain paginated ).  Prominence of story badges such as RR, Famous, and Legendary.  The # of stories on the new story page.  Notification when a vote is cast.

11.  Which general features do you miss the most? (ex. black boxes, ability to customize profiles, ability to sort friends, have friends all show on 1 page, settings don't hold, becoming part of a dating site, etc.)

Ability to search by name.  Author listings sortable by # of stories ( ideally, sortable by all stat columns ) 

12. Any other comments you would like to add or if there is anything you are particularly happy with on the new site.

As things stand, I have no desire to submit anything.  The inability to paste with formatting, the shortened window for new stories due to the halved new story page, the missing popular lists providing a possibility of longer lived readership, and the inability to actually see the statistics ( which don't even agree from listing to listing ) makes it feel like working twice as hard to toss things into the void.  I get that this was a rush job by necessity, but it's hard to be patient when basically everything I enjoyed about Lush and recommended it to other people for is all but absent.

Extremely frustrating for me as well.  I was watching Nude Holly Day climb at about 1k per month toward Legendary, and it's dead in the water now.  I'm half done with a story for the Watersports category ( one of the few remaining for Omnium ) and have no drive to finish it.  They really need to get the author features up and running.  As things are, there's little incentive to publish anything.  If that state of affairs continues for much longer, it's not going to end well.

Well, whadda ya know.  I knew that I had a couple ( surviving ) on the score lists, but didn't know Double Dip actually made the views list.  Thanks for collecting the stats. smile

Too bad it and the popular lists are now gone.  My views nosedived so hard they hit like the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs.

I keep poking my head in, but I don't see myself posting any new stories unless I happen to finish something that I plan to post somewhere else as well.  No motivation for the short Lush-exclusive quickies when the time on page 1 is so short and there's no potential for long-term viewership without those lists.  Feels like tossing them into the void and working twice as hard to do it.

Quote by deviantsusie

The loss of data is particularly annoying - the scores, how I cherished those 1 or 2 votes.. I used to like looking at the bar graphs of how the votes were spread. The number of views. I was slowly watching 'In the Library' heading towards Famous story. Now it's all rounded off. The loss of word counts. I liked being told how many words were in a story, not how long it might take me to read it. 


I was watching "Nude Holly Day" move not so slowly toward Legendary.  ( around 1k per month ) Since the update, it's almost completely stagnant, because the bulk of the reads were coming from its high position on the popular page for Mature, and in turn driving reads to my other work.  There's also either a glitch in the score calculation or someone cast the magical 4 on it that dropped it to 4.99, which means it would have vanished into obscurity anyway, as happened with my previous main driver "Boned" in Milf.  Without notifications of new votes, I have no idea which it is.

Quote by Brookell

So now I have to go outside Lush to do a function that I used to be able to do within Lush.  It's a workaround, but not a very elegant or intuitive one.  The ability to sort is another function I miss.

I am in IT and have done much new development.  The number one rule about implementing a new version of something was never take away functionality.  Even changing how it works, you always left the ability to do it the older way at least for a few releases. It let's you ease users into new things.  So many functions are gone or changed to the point of being less capable.  The few new things (time zone elimination in forums and the My Comments) are nice, but have we lost more than gained.  I haven't posted since the new site went up.  I haven't been interested in posting -- which for any of you who know me understand that's weird.  I haven't stopped writing, just not been posting. 


Believe me, I know.  I also get that this was on an impossible timetable, though.  I'm just as frustrated as you are with the loss of functionality, and finding patience difficult despite knowing there was a hard end date when whatever was ready had to go up.


I'm not writing, but that's me.  Part of it is because Lush is my preferred venue for short stuff, and there's no drive to start those with the current state of things.  I have at least half a dozen 5-50k word stories in progress, but I haven't been feeling them.  Part of my recovery process in these slumps is to write quickies, but with that drive gone...


The effort vs. reward calculation isn't balancing for me right now.  The truncated exposure window for new stories, the loss of the popular lists that were a major driver of reads for me, and the inability to see my own statistics in full severely tips the scales.  The loss of forum signature functionality sucks the life out of me as well.  I enjoyed crafting my banners, and there's no point in doing so as things stand.


If I finish anything ( and if the submission process doesn't prove to be another barrier ) I'll post it, but that's unlikely right now.

Quote by Brookell

I wish the Story List would be closer to how it was.  For example, when I was trying to find a story of my own, I would open the My Stories and the list would be all 194 of my stories.  I would do a Browser 'Find' on a word in the title or a key word and it would show up.  Finding the word 'Accident' brought me 7 stories to check to find what I was looking for.   With the stories broken up by pages, I have 20 pages to try and search through.  Some folks have many more pages.

Using the Search on the Stories page returned over 660 results for 'Accident' with my 7 buried in there somewhere.

The easiest way to find your stories as things stand is Google.  Search the title plus the limiter site:lushstories.com  The statistics displayed on the actual story page are slightly more detailed than those in your list anyway.  To narrow it down even more if the title has been used by more than one person, include your screen name in the search.


Nude Holly Day RejectReality site:lushstories.com


It's hardly ideal, but it works.  You can also enclose the title in quotes "Nude Holly Day" to ensure it searches for those words in that exact order.

Quote by kistinspencil
Quote by RejectReality


Click your ava, and then the "My Comments" link.  It's essentially the same thing.

Not even close
Hmm...  What's missing?  I'm seeing my comments and likes pop up.  The only other thing I can remember from the timeline was profile posts.
Quote by LakeShoreLimited
Quote by PJH
Quote by TheShyThespian
Quote by Brookell
Quote by JamesLlewellyn

I'm still not getting emails about the authors I'm following. And I know that some have published because I've seen their stories on the (very short) Front Page.

Moreover, I've received ZERO notifications that any of the 53 authors I'm following have published anything. That seems…unlikely.

Thanks.


My turn for a Me Too!  I hadn't noticed how few emails I was getting, thanks for the heads up!
Do we no longer get emails about the votes and comments we receive? You only get your notifications if you're in the site - the emails worked because it told you to go look. 
I miss the emails which told me that someone had commented or whatever and the one that said my story had been approved. Being in the UK, I used to like checking my emails in the morning to see how many comments (and friend requests?) I had received 'overnight'. I suppose that some of the things that I miss might still re-appear-it would be nice if they did. As I have not yet had a story published since the move I do not know if my copyright thingy applies on here either.
The "timeline" option is missing, isn't it? That was nice to have.

Click your ava, and then the "My Comments" link.  It's essentially the same thing.

At the very least, our story lists need to be searchable via a search bar dedicated to that purpose.  As things stand, it's easier to go to Google and do a search using the "site:lushstories.com" limiter to find our own stories than it is to do on the site.  Of course, until we have access to all of our full statistics ( and not the rounded off display of selected statistics currently available ) there's not much point in checking.

The recommended profile banner size ( or cover image, or whatever it's called ) also doesn't work on my phone.  It's cut off from both sides in portrait or landscape.  The inconsistent placement of your avatar image in relation to the banner with respect to phone vs. tablet or desktop also makes it virtually impossible to design your banner to accommodate it.  You essentially have to surrender over half of the bottom third of the banner and live with blank space for whatever you do want on there to be visible on both phones and desktop.

I'm trying to be patient, because I've done massive overhauls before, and I know what a pain it is.  The fact that the author features are what got the short end of the stick baffles me, though.

The notification in your activity feed remains even after the spammer and their spam have been deleted, so don't forget to click through to the account. That's the best place to report spammers anyway, and if the account is already gone, then you don't have to worry about it. Go back to your activity and click the "remove" link to fan away the last of their spammy stench. smile
I'm a little pissed because a story idea I had dies on the vine with this news. Shy guy is marginally acquainted with a hot girl because they grew up in the same neighborhood and are going to the same college. She has it in her head that he's gay. He's an A.V. nerd with all sorts of equipment. When she and a bunch of other only fans girls pool their money to rent a fancy house on Air B&B, planning loads of cross-pollinating content, live streams, etc. she hires him to come do some filming. Though he tries to keep his cool, it's not long before she figures out he's not into other guys. LOL That leaves him the only male at is what is essentially one long porn shoot and sometimes orgy.

Naturally titled, "Only Fan".

Alas, a story that didn't completely congeal until it was too late. This is too much of a shockwave to not acknowledge, and spending the money ( even pooled ) for something like this makes no sense in light of that shockwave. May be able tor reuse some of the plot, but losing that perfect wordplay title kind of killed my motivation to even think about it.
I honestly don't see where OnlyFans is going to go. Their entire model is built on porn. They're pretty much toast. I'll be shocked if it even exists by December. It will be a meme like Vine for a year or so, and then be all but forgotten. Most of the models are doing last-chance sales, trying to maximize profit while they can, and trying to funnel fans to other platforms like Manyvids — which most were happy to either leave or marginalize in favor of OF. Now they're having to run back to a place they don't really care for in most cases.

( My wife was a camgirl in the late 90s/early 2000s, and I was a chat admin, so I still have a lot of contacts. )

It's like remote modeling for camgirls, erotica Ebooks on Amazon, independent creators on YouTube, and everything else. You get in early before the corporates, lawyers, and bankers get too ingrained. Once that happens, kiss any profit potential goodbye.
Quote by noll


True, though you probably don't want an extremely long page to load either, and there will also be a difference between stories below and above the 'fold'.

Maybe part of the list could be a random selection from the latest stories. That way stories that quickly get pushed out of view, or entirely off the list, would still get displayed some additional number times.


For the landing page, that could be an appropriate strategy, with only six stories listed. Randomize those from the last 24 hours of published stories, rather than a straight order of approval listing. Something from below the fold or on page 2 could jump out and catch someone before they click through to the new story listing, which will probably be the primary story selection point.

Actually, from a cold business point of view, it should probably be stories with the most activity on that landing page, in order to draw people in. It's giving a boost to stories that are already doing well, but for Lush's bottom line, a story with 40 votes and 1k views is a better selling point than one with 2 votes and 75 views. I don't like the idea, but it makes sense nevertheless. That's what the landing page is for.

Also, random is never random. The odds are that it's just going to create an entirely different set of winners and losers, rather than leveling the playing field. Then you have to add in the cost of additional programming and explanation. Approval order is easy to explain. Once math is involved, it become witchcraft to many people, and that's what randomization is.

As things are — good and bad luck aside — you get about a day on the front page. Cut the number displayed in half, and you're most likely going to cut the time in half. That's going to be especially true in the beginning, because readers are very slow to change their habits, and it's painfully obvious that they don't bother clicking to page 2 in most cases.

With all the sidebars and other extraneous load time removed ( the landing page is the new story page in the current design ) I doubt loading 30 will cause the page to be slow.
Quote by noll


While I can't answer your question for Lush/SS, the fact that the majority of users use a mobile device to browse the web these days indicates a decline in screen real estate. This means less space for stories or anything else for that matter.


Horizontally maybe, but there's nothing restricting the scroll bar. 15 probably isn't going to cause huge problems on SS, but here... Put me down for Lush should maintain 30 stories per page. All it takes is to be the unlucky sod who lands in the queue at the start of a flurry of approvals for your story to land on page 2 oblivion an hour after it premiers with the per-page cut in half.
Six stories on the front page and fifteen if you click through to the story specific page. Is that going to be the standard? Feels like a recipe for stories to regularly descend into no-view oblivion within hours of publishing if that's the planned pagination here.
Just noticed that Nude Holly Day is less than 5k from becoming my second Legendary story, so why not give it a read and push it a wee bit closer!

By way of promotion, I'll post some feedback that someone sent to the website, which an admin then passed on to me.

==============

1. The story, Nude-Holly-Day, by Reject Reality was one of the most enjoyable, intense, well crafted, and even instructive stories I've ever encountered. While the biology-based eroticism is excellent in most of your stories, this one (Holly) was far beyond that. The Holly story was to regular good stories as color is to black-and-white because of the added layers in the story.
a. Honor and decency. The protagonist portrayed the best characteristics of respect and appreciation for the Holly character.
b. The caring he showed Holly added depth to the story far beyond the delightful eroticism.
c. The honor and care showed for the Holly character by the protagonist put this story into the top level of literature.
d. The details of the physical love-making functioned almost as a lesson for top-level love-making. Society would profit from this sort of story being made to be required reading for all high-schoolers.

===============

Needless to say, it's one of the most encouraging comments I've ever received.

Read Nude Holly Day here!
As much as anything, I added this post to highlight my forum banner for "IHOP". The cover for this one was more or less all NSFW, leaving no option for creative cropping, so I had to go with censoring. I'm particularly happy with the pancake stack censor I used on this one. I put so much effort into making that stack big enough to cover everything up. I copy/pasted two sections of stack, tilted them, blended them, and then still had to stretch the final image to completely cover up Mr. Happy behind there while still leaving her hand in the shot to sort of convey what was going on. I damn near went to the effort of having her fingers curl around the stack, but decided I'd already spent way too much time on something that was only going to be public until the next story gets released.

"Her Cut to the Chase" is slowly creeping up there. Surprisingly, the quickie "Overheard" has already joined the 20k club. It will hit the listings the next time I decide to run the numbers.

As I posted in my most recent blog, if you favorite a story, please consider casting a 5 vote as well. All those potential 5s can do a lot to reduce the influence of the 4s ( and recently, a lot of 2s and 3s ) that pop up on stories and kill their visibility.
Congratulations! Getting read is what it's all about.

I'm still trying to creep up on 3M LOL
Quote by WannabeWordsmith
@LakeShoreLimited and seeker4. True. If it's used well and is totally left field like that, and feeds the story with intrigue then why the hell not! But if it's just thrown in as a name because the author picked one at random and it doesn't fit the character and their backstory, then it can be momentarily jarring for a reader.

For fantasy and sci-fi, I sometimes find authors go too far the other way to call their characters unpronounceable or obscure things (or bad spellings of conventional names) to push the idea that it's an alternative reality. If I'm reading and can't figure out if the object being referred to is a person or place, I tend to switch off.



*snore*


For some reason, my world has bent toward women having real-world names like Alicia, Christi, Carol, etc. Men seem to have a weird convention where their names are conglomerations of ancestor's names. Thakkorias. Darkniciad. Sagittariad. Cerebus.

Of course, they all have shortened versions/nicknames that are easy to deal with. Thakkor, Darkni, Saj, Mindblind
On the first read-through, I change the font size and face to something very different from what I write in. The change in appearance and position of the words on screen will sometimes cause errors jump out at you. The first read is for flow and continuity errors, though I'll correct grammar when I come across it.

Next I run it through the Grammar checkers in Wordperfect and Word. Neither are perfect, and they don't always agree, but every time one stops to alert you, there's a chance of finding something that could be tweaked.

Next it goes into text-to-speech. The free ones have robotic voices, and they'll always mispronounce some words, but you'll probably be amazed how many you->your/his->her type errors you'll catch hearing it read to you. If you can spring for a paid version, the voices are often more natural, and the better ones let you tweak pronunciation of common words ( like pussy, which mine butchered and drove me nuts with ) and character names via phonetic spelling in a pronunciation editor.

The final step used to be sending it off to my editor, but unfortunately, he retired after years of invaluable assistance. The search to find someone I meshed with was exhausting, and I haven't felt up to wading into the process again. So apologies to the mods for how many comma tweaks they have to do to my stuff nowadays.
I'm a mainstream fantasy reader, so I trend toward higher degrees of story and world-building when it comes to reading things like that. Otherwise, it depends upon the day, whether I'm reading or writing. I may dash off a quick fantasy story without much setup like "Little Fuckers" or I may be working on a 50-60k story with minimal and sometimes even weirdly dispassionate sex about a prostitute setting out to start her own brothel and running into dangerous competition from the local whore in "One Whore's Town".

I like to have interesting characters, but it doesn't take 5k words to set that up. Someone can be interesting in a couple of sentences. The situation leading to the sex can be the same. While I prefer to write extremely detailed sex scenes ( also one of my calling cards ) I don't necessarily need them in what I read.

Really impossible for me to answer either writing or reading. I'm all over the map.